Professor Antonino Zichichi's Short Biography

Prof. Antonino Zichichi

Antonino Zichichi has produced over nine hundred fifty scientific works. These include many discoveries, inventions, original ideas that have opened up new paths in high-energy subnuclear physics and high-precision measurements.

Discoveries: of nuclear antimatter; of the effective energy in interactions between quarks and gluons; of the time-like structure of the proton; of the first example of a baryonic particle with a quark of the third family; of the so-called leading effect in the production of baryons with subnuclear flavour charges of the second and third family of quarks; that the final, charged heavy building block of the universe – the proton – cannot be broken at the extreme energies thus far achieved.

Inventions: of the technique for constructing very high-precision polynomial magnetic fields; of the technique for the high-resolution identification of lepton-antilepton pairs; of the electronic circuit for the high-precision measurement (100 ps; ps = a thousandth of a billionth of a second) of the flight times of subnuclear particles; of the missing-mass spectrometer for neutrons with high spatial and temporal resolutions.

Original ideas: of the third lepton column in the structure of fundamental particles: this led to the discovery of the third lepton; of studying new vector meson states by means of their decay in neutral lepton pairs: this led to the discovery of vector mesons composed of quark-antiquark pairs of the second and third column in the structure of fundamental particles (quarks and leptons); of studying the effect of the variation of masses in the convergence of fundamental forces: this led to the discovery of the EGM effect, which lowers by a factor of 700 the level of energy (for which there is no known absolute value) required to discover the superworld.

High-precision measurements: of universal weak charge; of the magnetic moment of the muon; of the universality of electromagnetic forces at high energies; of pseudoscalar and vector meson mixings.

Other Information

A.Z. has received awards and honorary degrees from Universities and Academic Institutions in Italy and in many other countries, including Argentina, China, Georgia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and USA.

A.Z. founded and directs the «Ettore Majorana» Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, the first example of University for the Third Millennium, making Erice famous world-wide. 

A.Z. is

•Emeritus Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna;

•Past President of the INFN (The Italian National Institute for Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics);

•Past President of the EPS (The European Physical Society);

•Past President of the NATO Science Committee for Disarmament Technology (nuclear, chemical, bacteriological and conventional);

•President of the World Federation of Scientists, with ten thousand scientists from 115 countries;

•President of the “Enrico Fermi Centre”, Rome, Italy.

He is the author of eleven books: 8 in Italian and 3 in English: L’Infinito, Il Cigno Galileo Galilei, three editions, Rizzoli-Bur, seven editions (1988-1994), Pratiche Editrice, six editions (1998-2001), Il Saggiatore-NET (2005-2006), and Marco Tropea Editore (2009); Scienza ed Emergenze Planetarie, Rizzoli, three editions (1993-1994), Supersaggi Rizzoli, twenty-three editions (1996-2006); Creativity in Science, first edition 1996, World Scientific (1999), translated into Russian and published by YPCC, Moscow (2001); Subnuclear Physics - The First Fifty Years, a joint publication by the University and the Academy of Sciences of Bologna, Italy (1998), 20th Century Physics Series, Vol. 24, World Scientific (2000-2001); Perché io credo in Colui che ha fatto il mondo, Il Saggiatore, twenty-three editions (1999-2005), translated into Portuguese and published by Editora Objetiva Ltda, Rio de Janeiro (2000), translated into French and published by Éditions Salvator, Paris (2003); L’irresistibile fascino del Tempo, Il Saggiatore, five editions (2000), and Il Saggiatore-NET, three editions (2004-2005); Galilei, divin uomo, Il Saggiatore, four editions (2001-2006), and Marco Tropea Editore (2009); Il vero e il falso, Il Saggiatore, four editions (2003-2006); translated into Chinese and published by Shanghai Scientific & Technical Publishers (2006); Galilei. Dall’Ipse Dixit al processo di oggi. 100 risposte, Il Saggiatore (2004); Tra Fede e Scienza. Da Giovanni Paolo II a Benedetto XVI, Il Saggiatore, three editions (2005-2006); Ettore Majorana – His Genius and Long-Lasting Legacy, Italian Physical Society (2007).

The main achievement of A.Z. are reported in seven volumes published in his honour.

1)Lepton Physics at CERN and Frascati
N. Cabibbo Ed., 20th Century Physics Series, Vol. 8, World Scientific (1994).

2)The Discovery of Nuclear Antimatter
T.D. Lee, S.C.C. Ting, T. Ypsilantis, G.C. Setti, F. Palmonari;  L. Maiani and R.A. Ricci Eds., Conference Proceedings 53, Italian Physical Society, Bologna, Italy (1995).

3)The Origin of the Third Family
C.S. Wu, T.D. Lee, N. Cabibbo, V.F. Weisskopf, S.C.C. Ting, C. Villi, M. Conversi, A. Petermann, B.H. Wiik and G. Wolf;  O. Barnabei, L. Maiani, R.A. Ricci and F. Roversi Monaco Eds., a joint publication by University and Academy of Sciences of Bologna, INFN, SIF (1997);  20th Century Physics Series, Vol. 20, World Scientific (1998).

4)The Gran Sasso Laboratory 1979-1999. A Vision Becomes Reality
A. Bettini, INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (1999).

5)The Creation of Quantum ChromoDynamics and the Effective Energy 
V.N. Gribov, G. 't Hooft, G. Veneziano and V.F. Weisskopf;  N.L. Lipatov Ed., a joint publication by University and Academy of Sciences of Bologna, INFN, SIF (1998):  20th Century Physics Series, Vol. 25, World Scientific (2000).

6)From the Preshower to the New Technologies for Supercolliders
B.H. Wiik, A. Wagner, H. Wenninger Ed., a joint publication by DESY, CERN, University and Academy of Sciences of Bologna (2000);  20th Century Physics Series, Vol. 31, World Scientific  (2002).

7)The Roots of LEP and LHC
preface by R. Aymar, CERN/DG-306-0 (2004).